Sleeping on the Diagonal

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS POETRY AND IT MAY CONTAIN ANGST

(I warned you)

MERLOT

Scrubbing the stain of last night’s spilt wine,

Foaming suds bristling and popping,

Unable to erase the burnt Merlot

Seeped deep into the fabric.

Such a simple mistake,

The wobbling of a glass when

Our parting fingers brushed

Against its stem.

And then a liquid cascade

Tumbling end over end,

Twisting river of red rushing

To the floor bracing below.

Perhaps if I had cleaned it last night

My hands would not be raw

And red, matching the stain

You left behind for me to clean.

Something a bit different this week my friends.  I’m working on several long topics in my head but they’re all in swirling gestation at the moment.  I went back and dug up some poetry I wrote a lifetime and a half ago, back in my angsty youth when I still thought in poetry inside the nest of my head, from before I abandoned writing for “normal” life.  These days I tend to think more in pragmatic prose but I know there’s still a poet buried in there deep.  I do believe poetry is great exercise in crafting within given boundaries and really thinking about the conciseness and impact of the words themselves. So tonight I went back to some previous work to find a place to begin anew.  At the time I wrote this I was in a creative writing class and the constructive feedback I received was “sounds like a post-modern paper towel commercial”.   Do y’all think it sounds like Mr. Clean smokes a joint and joins a drum circle?